Anti-foundationalism

Anti-foundationalism (also called nonfoundationalism) is any philosophy which rejects a foundationalist approach. An anti-foundationalist is one who does not believe that there is some fundamental belief or principle which is the basic ground or foundation of inquiry and knowledge.

Anti-foundationalism can be metaphysical (positing a ground of being or metaphysical foundation), ethical (positing some value or virtue as fundamental), epistemological (i.e. the foundationalist theory of justification) or apply to some other field with foundationalist theories.

Anti-foundationalists use logical or historical or genealogical attacks on foundational concepts (see especially Nietzsche and Foucault), often coupled with alternative methods for justifying and forwarding intellectual inquiry, such as the pragmatic subordination of knowledge to practical action. Foucault dismissed the search for a return to origins as Platonic essentialism, preferring to stress the contingent nature of human practices.

Anti-foundationalists oppose metaphysical methods. Moral and ethical anti-foundationalists are often criticized for moral relativism, but anti-foundationalists often dispute this charge, offering alternative methods of moral thought that they claim do not require foundations. Thus while Charles Taylor accused Foucault of having "no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life", Foucault nevertheless insists on the need for continuing ethical enquiry without any universal system to appeal to.

Niklas Luhmann used cybernetics to challenge the role of foundational unities and canonical certainties.

Anti-foundationalists oppose totalising visions of social, scientific or historical reality, considering them to lack legitimation, and preferring local narratives instead. No social totality but a multitude of local and concrete practices; "not a history but at best histories". In such neopragmatism, there is no overall truth, merely an ongoing process of better and more fruitful methods of edification. Even our most taken-for-granted categories for social analysis—of gender, sex, race, and class—are considered by anti-essentialists like Marjorie Garber as social constructs.

Stanley Fish distinguishes between what he calls "antifoundationalist theory hope" and "antifoundationalist theory fear"—finding them however both equally illusory.

Fear of the corrosive effects of antifoundationalism was widespread in the late twentieth century, anticipating such things as a cultural meltdown and moral anarchy, or (at the least) a loss of the necessary critical distance to allow for leverage against the status quo. For Fish, however, the threat of a loss of objective standards of rational enquiry with the disappearance of any founding principle was a false fear: far from opening the way to an unbridled subjectivity, antifoundationalism leaves the individual firmly entrenched within the conventional context and standards of enquiry/dispute of the discipline/profession/habitus within which s/he is irrevocably placed.